Well, it looks like Bernie Machen is laying his cards on the table a little more openly than I originally thought, based on this absurd post at TBO.com.

For starters,

As University of Florida basketball players cut down the nets at the Edward Jones Dome on Sunday, UF president Bernie Machen let his imagination run wild. Can you picture, someone asked Machen, this scene on a football field?”Exactly,” Machen said. “I mean, c’mon. Take this, adapt it and blow it up. Think of what it would be like.”

It is a pretty tantalizing possibility, a Division I-A football tournament designed to capture the same magic as March Madness. If Machen’s fellow presidents will listen, it could happen sooner than you might think.

March Madness is the most perfectly conceived sporting event since the World Cup.[Emphasis added.] It plays to our love of the underdog. It plays to our love of rare, intersectional matchups. Gamblers love it, and though the NCAA wishes they didn’t, it is more than happy to take their eyeballs on the telecast so it may demand more money from CBS, which in turn charges higher advertising rates.

From reading this, you almost get the impression that no one is really that interested in college football these days, at least not in the way that the entire world is captivated by college basketball. (Nevermind that a bunch of us were tuned in to the BCS title game. There was probably nothing else on the tube that night to watch but reruns, anyway.)

Along the same line, we get treated to all sorts of unsubstantiated assertions, like this one –

If big-time college basketball determined its champion the way college football does, fewer people would watch.

and this one –

If the NCAA braintrust is smart – and it has offered precious little proof of that to this point – it would create a 16-team football tournament, played over four weeks, that included the 11 conference champions and five at-large teams.

The first time No. 15 seed Middle Tennessee upset second-seeded Michigan in a first-round game, the nation would be hooked. CBS pays the NCAA $545 million a year to televise the men’s basketball tournament. By its second contract, a football tournament would command a $1 billion rights fee.

and, finally, this one:

A football tournament would captivate the nation in a way the guys in the hideous bowl blazers never dreamed. It wouldn’t destroy the bowls, either. The tournament couldn’t handle more than 16 teams.

There’s also the delusional part:

… Only a few dozen athletic departments – Florida is one – operate in the black. More money from the NCAA means less that gets billed to taxpayers and fewer complaints from the faculty about buying blocking sleds instead of test tubes.

Understand that none – absolutely none – of this is borne out by the current numbers. Also understand that the formula used to distribute the money will change radically once the postseason falls under the control of the NCAA. Does the author not realize that Middle Tennessee (and what about Middle Tennessee’s conference?) would expect a bigger piece of the pie under the new and improved format? Or that, just as has occurred in college basketball, more schools will gravitate towards D-1 in order to stake their claims to a piece of that pie?

I know, I know – don’t confuse him with the facts.

Especially when he’s already come up with such a nifty nickname for a D-1 playoff:

Machen understands this. That’s why he believes we’ll have a chance to enjoy March Madness and a December to Remember.

One response to “I think I’m gonna puke.”

Quote Of The Day

“Give them credit, but I think everybody can see that Georgia’s going to be a force to be reckoned with. I’m very proud of this team and this university, and we’re not going anywhere.’ — Kirby Smart, AJ-C, 1/9/18